Tantalizing Tales — August 2025 — Part Three

Hello, dear readers! It is midway through August and publishers are already pivoting hard to horror, as is tradition. Tho I gotta tell you, the pivot does feel a little more comforting than usual this year, given the state of the world and the ways in which horror stories are oftentimes just how the mind tries to cope with crimes so grotesque as to seem unsolvable.

Thus we have some great horror and mystery novels to highlight for you this week, beginning with Daphne Fama’s electrifying horror debut, House Of Monstrous Women. Infused with a dose of rich Filipino folklore inspired by the author’s own upbringing in a Filipino community in the American South, HoMW blends the childhood stories she learned from her mother with interviews from Carigara elders and folk practitioners of both healing and cursing.

Our heroine Josephine lives alone, orphaned after her father’s political campaign ends in unimaginable tragedy. Her older brother is in Manila, where a revolution brews. The country is in turmoil, and so is Josephine’s life. As Josephine begins to feel even more hopeless and uncertain, an unusual invitation arrives from her estranged childhood friend, Hiraya Ranoco: Why don’t you come visit, and we can play games like we used to?

Josephine left Hiraya in the past for a reason: she is rumored to come from a family of shapeshifting witches, or aswang, who live in a maze-like manor perched beside a treacherous sea. But there’s something about Hiraya that Josephine has never been able to resist.

When Josephine arrives at the eerie old house, she discovers that her brother has also been summoned and that a perilous game is afoot. The winner will earn all their heart’s desires. For Josephine, who has lost everything, this is a tantalizing proposition. But there is something menacing about this invitation…and it’s clear that Josephine and her brother do not know the entire truth about why they are here. As the Philippines descends into chaos outside the manor’s walls, danger is lurking around every corner on the inside as well. And if Josephine isn’t careful, she’ll find that change is sometimes bought with blood.

~~~~~~~

Another horror novel revolving around a game is Bram Stoker Award-winning Hailey Piper’s monstrous mash-up A Game In Yellow that, indeed, references the Robert W Chambers classic of madness and cosmic terror. Here, Ms Piper infuses a classic collection of supernatural fiction with queer erotic elements in her tale of women behaving badly.

Carmen and Blanca are a kink-fixated couple in a sexual rut. But then Blanca discovers the enigmatic Smoke in an under-street drug den, who holds pages to a strange play titled The King in Yellow.

Read too much of the play and you’ll fall into madness. But read just a little and pull back, and it gives you the adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria, leading Carmen to fall into a game of lust at the edge of a nightmare. As the line blurs between the world Carmen knows and the one that she visits after reading from the play, she begins to desire more time in this other world, no matter what horrors she brings back with her.

~~~~~~~

The third of this week’s releases is a different sort of romance, with Sienna Sharpe’s murderous rom-com A Killer Getaway. This wellness industry satire takes the idea of a female serial killer and wraps it up in a slow-burn rivals-to-lovers romance, even as it explores themes of grief, loss and second chances.

No one in Lily Lennox’s life can understand why she’s shuttered her successful business each of the past five summers and chosen instead to be paid minimum wage while lifeguarding at the exclusive Riovan Wellness Resort on a sun-soaked Caribbean island. Fortunately for her, they’re also unaware of the mysterious deaths that have occurred on the island every time she’s there.

Lily always does her best not to attract attention. She is determined to make toxic people pay for the damage they do – and when your mission is murder, it’s best not to draw suspicious eyes.

But this year, the very attractive guest and podcaster Daniel Black is asking a few too many inconvenient questions. Is he there to hunt her down? And if so, how will she manage her growing attraction towards him – even as she works at getting away with murder once more?

~~~~~~~

Also just coming out recently is Nishizawa Yasuhiko’s The Man Who Died Seven Times, translated from the original Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood. I’m still not entirely certain if it comes out this week, next week or already came out several weeks past, but that seems almost appropriate for a time-travel murder mystery!

Hisataro, a young member of the wealthy Fuchigami family, has a mysterious ability. Every now and then, against his will, he falls into a time-loop in which he is obliged to re-live the same day a total of 9 times. This seems more like a burden than a blessing… until the day his grandfather dies under suspicious circumstances.

As he returns to the day of the murder time and again, Hisataro begins to unravel its secrets. With a sizeable inheritance up for grabs, motives abound and everyone is a suspect. Can Hisataro solve the mystery of his grandfather’s death before his time runs out? Perhaps more importantly, could he even stop the murder from happening?

~~~~~~~

Family secrets also lie at the heart of Winnie M Li’s latest novel, What We Left Unsaid, as three estranged siblings find themselves on an unexpected road trip that uncovers startling truths about both their own family and being Asian American in a post-COVID world.

The Chu siblings haven’t seen each other in years. But when they’re told that their ailing mother is scheduled for an operation next month, they agree to visit her together. Then their mother makes an odd request: before coming to see her, they must go on a road trip together to the Grand Canyon.

Thirty years ago, a strange incident had aborted a previous family road trip there. No one’s ever really spoken about it, but during this journey the now middle-aged Chu siblings have no choice but to confront their childhood experience head on.

Together, Bonnie, Kevin and Alex travel along Route 66. As the trip continues, however, they realize that the Great American Road Trip may not be what they expected. Facing both their own prejudices and those of others, they must somehow learn to bridge the distances between them, and between the present day and their past.

~~~~~~~

The past, however, is where we’re staying with Isabel Canas’ newest historical horror novel The Possession Of Alba Diaz. Set in 1765 among the silver mines of Mexico, this supernatural-meets-body-horror story of demonic possession kneads together mysticism and sorcery, the science and supernatural powers of alchemy, and the patriarchal grip of the Church on mining towns to examine the earthly and unearthly ways in which a woman’s body can be owned.

As plague sweeps through Zacatecas, Alba Díaz flees with her wealthy merchant parents and fiancé Carlos to his family’s isolated mine. There Alba begins hallucinating, sleepwalking and suffering from violent convulsions. Something cold is lurking beneath her skin. Something angry. Something wrong.

Elías, Carlos’s troubled cousin, came to the New World to make his fortune and escape his family’s legacy of greed. Alba is thus none of his business. But he can’t help but notice the growing tension between them every time she enters the room, or how she deteriorates as the demon’s ungodly stranglehold on her grows stronger. In the fight for her life, Alba and Elías become entangled with the occult, the Church, long-kept secrets, and each other… not knowing that one of these things will spell their doom.

~~~~~~~

Finally, we have the latest offering from bestselling #HorrorBookTok sensation Ania Ahlborn with The Unseen. Capturing the ripple effects of postpartum psychosis and PTSD, the author masterfully renders multiple distinct points of view — from a browbeaten middle-aged husband and father, to each of his five children — while examining the darkest depths of grief and motherhood to devastating effect.

Isla Hansen, a mother still reeling from loss, is beside herself when a mysteriously orphaned child appears on the outskirts of her secluded Colorado property. Although strange and unexplainable, the child’s presence breathes new life into the grieving woman.

But as the child settles in, Isla’s husband Luke and their five children notice peculiarities that hint at something far beyond the ordinary—anomalies that challenge the very fabric of reality itself. The tension within the Hansen household grows, and with it the sense that there is something very wrong with the new kid in the house.

~~~~~~~

Let me know if you’re able to get to any of these books before I do, dear readers! I’d love to hear your opinions, and see if that will help spur me to push any of them higher up the mountain range that is my To Be Read pile.

And, as always, you can check out the list of my favorite books in my Bookshop storefront linked below!